MILWAUKEE—There’s a scene in Easy Rider, the 1969 film that launched a generation of Harley riders, where Jack Nicholson’s character, an alcoholic country lawyer, sits by a campfire with a pair of bikers played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

Hopper, who has just been run out of a Louisiana diner, slurred for his shoulder-length hair, tells Nicholson that the problem with the country is that “everybody got scared,” that people “think we’re gunna cut their throat or something.” Nicholson disagrees. “Oh, they’re not scared of you,” he says.

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“They’re scared of what you represent to ’em.” And what the bikers represent, Nicholson says, “is freedom.”

“What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man?” Hopper says, exhaling smoke from a joint. “That’s what it’s all about.”

“That’s what it’s all about all right,” Nicholson replies. “But talking about it and being it—that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the market place. ’Course don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gunna get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah they’re gunna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gunna scare ’em.”

This past weekend at Harley-Davidson’s 115th anniversary celebration, which drew roughly150,000 bikers to events across Milwaukee, the strains of Easy Rider were still in the air. Nearly a half-century after the film’s debut, the motorcycle remains a symbol of freedom—a way into a world apart from the world, a world that’s freer, more primal, more alive. But today, there’s at least one new development: For many in the crowd, motorcycle culture translates to a full-fledged embrace of President Donald Trump, who they say embodies the same rebellious spirit. They defended the commander in chief, despite—or perhaps even because of—his public spat with their favored brand.

At Harley’s global headquarters, where bikers stopped for photos amidst their tours of the city, the word “FREEDOM” greets visitors as they enter, cut out of steel in seven-foot letters. Behind the reception desk are more cutouts: “MUSCLE” and “ReBEL” are the largest and most prominent, with “FREEDOM” and “BELONGING” bridging the gap between them. In a conference room where bikers mill about, a paragraph made to look like an American flag adorns the wall. “We don’t do fear,” it says, adding later, “Freedom and wind outlast hard times. And the rumble of an engine drowns out all the blah, blah, blah on the evening news.”

In Harleys, somehow rebellion and patriotism fuse together. The flag and the military loom large in the festivities. At the anniversary kickoff, three paratroopers jump from a Vietnam-era helicopter while a company spokesman reminds the assembled bikers that they are standing in Milwaukee’s Veterans Park. “That’s America right there, that’s incredible,” he says as the soldiers drift down with a giant flag, thanking them “for being the badasses that you are.” “We’re going to sing the national anthem, ladies and gentlemen,” the spokesman says when the soldiers are safely on the ground, “because again, we are celebrating America right along with this incredible American brand.”

After the ceremony, I talk with Jerry Bellin, 60, a retired union ironworker who rode 90 miles here from his Wisconsin home. A long white beard extends down Bellin’s face beneath a confederate battle flag bandana. He wears the bandana, he says, because “it’s a rebel thing,” though he also says he wears it simply because a former tenant abandoned it amongst debris at an apartment he owns. The same word comes up when Bellin talks about the president. “He ran as a Republican, but I just like the rebel-ism,” he says.

Bellin shrugs off the president’s spat with Harley. Earlier this summer, Harley announced it would expand overseas production in order to evade E.U. tariffs levied as retaliation against Trump’s tariffs on steel. In a mid-August Twitter post, the president encouraged a boycott of the company. “Other countries do it to us,” Bellin says, referring to tariffs. “And we should protect ourselves. Without being racist or anything, but you see all the Asian people here? Look what kind of car they’re driving. They’re driving all Toyotas and Hondas and stuff. They protect their own country, even though they’re here. And that’s just the way it should be. Germans should be buying a German car, I think. Americans should be buying American.”

I hear this kind of thing repeatedly over several days: support for the president and indifference about both Harley’s response to the tariffs and the president’s attacks on Harley—the company whose bikes, of course, everyone is riding and celebrating. Some of the bikers I speak with are unaware of any discord at all.

A man wearing a MAGA hat and a Harley shirt on the fairgrounds, who gives his name only as Marty, says of the president’s call for a boycott of Harley: “Oh, I didn’t get involved in that too much. I don’t know. I really can’t comment on it. I can comment on some other stuff if you want me to. Trump’s the man. He’s got my vote and I’m proud of it and he’s doing wonderful things for our economy and our country.”

Dean Gilbert, 62, who traveled with his wife and son from North Carolina, calls the tariff issues “news media hype.” “I don’t think it’s as bad as the news media says it is. And I may be wrong, but look,” he says, gesturing to his bike a few feet away, “how much steel is there in a Harley? The beef was that tariffs on the steel are gunna raise the price of the bikes. I don’t know if I believe that.” As to the president’s call for a boycott, Gilbert says, “you’ll have a few people that’ll say ‘I just won’t spend as much,’ but if you ride a Harley, you’ll ride a Harley. It wouldn’t stop me from buying one.”

After Chuck Lennon, 67, has his picture taken in front of Harley headquarters on his yellow chrome bike, he tells me he “would rather Harley not build overseas, but I can see why they need to.” Lennon, a retired engineer from Las Vegas, generally supports the president, but he would not boycott Harley. “Trump says a lot of things,” he says. “It’s OK. We elected him.” Lennon is more concerned about “a small minority of groups that are trying to either rattle or destroy this country” than about Harley or tariffs. “The worst part about it,” he says, “is I think half of the protesters you see that are out there, they’re actually paid to be demonstrators. I honestly believe that.”

In the Harley-Davidson Museum, a famous speech from another 1960s biker film starring Peter Fonda, The Wild Angels—“We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man. And we wanna get loaded.”—is featured prominently in a montage of old movie clips. So are scenes of Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson out cruising in Easy Rider, Fonda seated on his “Captain America” chopper painted with stars and stripes. A replica of that bike sits opposite where the montage plays.

A flag hangs from a pedestrian bridge at the Harley-Davidson headquarters. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

I notice a man watch the seven-minute montage and then return to the video screen a short time later to watch a second time. Afterwards, I ask what the clips mean to him, and the man, a retired soldier from Texas who gives his name only as Jon, talks about Easy Rider and feeling free on the road when he got his first Harley at 14, now 46 years ago. Then the conversation turns to Trump.

“I’m not really familiar with what’s going on with Harley and all that,” he says. He would rather talk about immigration, telling me that “Germany was a good place” before “Merkel let all the Muslims in from Syria and it changed the culture over there.” Now “that place is going to shit.” “People coming into this country,” he says, need to “do it legally, and learn our traditions. I don’t want to know their damn shit. I really don’t.”

This, of course, reflects a particular—and narrow—view of freedom, rebellion and patriotism. Harley, too, offers a particular view, one rich in paradoxes. The company sells a pre-packaged rebellion, a starter kit that offers just enough customization for each rebel, on his or her own bike and in his or her own logoed paraphernalia, to feel unique. It sells freedom by way of conformity, sells consumers a rejection of consumerism.

Harley does all this at rapt attention to flag and country, rendering the rebellion less against “the man” and more against the danger of an ill-defined decline. It unites a tribe around the shared memory of a mythic time when freedom, rebellion and country all were a harmonious whole, embodied within the swashbuckling cowboy, a man beholden to none, free to roam and take whatever he thought was his.

“Who among us would not want to climb on a machine dripping in freedom and American style?” Bill Thomas, 64, says when I ask him why he rides a Harley. We are seated with his wife Linda, 65, at a makeshift bar on a beach along Lake Michigan. Earlier there were Harley races in the sand. “To breathe the very air that collides with the chrome steel you ride? ’Cause all we want to do is be free to ride our machines, get loaded when we want to, and not be hassled by the man.”

Bill laughs as he acknowledges that he is borrowing part of Fonda’s speech from The Wild Angels, the same one playing in the Harley museum. But what really got him on a bike, he says, was seeing Easy Rider at a drive-in theater when he was 15: “Ever since then, all I wanted was a motorcycle.” Now, Linda chimes in, he has three in the garage at their Pittsburgh home. “All Harleys,” Linda says. “Is there anything else?”

It is fitting—ironic, too—that Easy Rider has taken on such a central role in the mythology of Harley-Davison. Late in the film, Hopper and Fonda sit by another campfire, this time without Nicholson, whose character has died in a senseless act of violence. As Fonda broods, Hopper tries to cheer him up.

“We did it!” he says. “We’re rich, man. We’re retirin’ in Florida now, mister.” Hopper is recalling the opening scenes of the film, where he and Fonda are middlemen in a drug deal, selling cocaine to a man in a Rolls Royce for a bundle of cash. The bills are still hidden in the fuel tank of Fonda’s bike. But the reminder does not cheer Fonda. “We blew it,” he says to Hopper, grimacing. “We blew it.”

The bikers thought they were buying their freedom, but really they were selling out, trading in their ideals for an easy payoff from the establishment. And retiring to Florida is not exactly the stuff of biker lore. Their vaunted freedom, it turns out, was just a mirage, a fantasy. When Fonda and Hopper’s lives are taken in the film’s iconic final scene, they are not merely victims of the killers, but of themselves.

And yet, at least among the aging generation that still makes up Harley’s core constituency, the fantasy lives on. Fonda and Hopper’s biker characters are heroes and martyrs who stand for freedom, a totem powerful enough that in its service both Harley and the president can be right, or close enough to right that the disagreement doesn’t really matter. “’Course,” as Nicholson said, “don’t ever tell anybody they’re not free.”